#race politics

[hussyknee]

People are really hung up on this idea that ambiguity affords protection, and that it's the same as privilege. As though having camouflage means you aren't hunted.

Only the oppressed are concerned with our own variation and degree of difference. There is no such ambiguity in the eyes of the oppressor. They don't care how like them you are, in fact being like them is all the more reason to punish you and keep you in your place. The project of exclusion is not to force conformity, it's to find people to make an example of so that others comply with the oppressor's hierarchial power structure and struggle desperately to conform. Exclusion is purely a show of power. The more people try to conform, the more they fail, the more can be made examples of. This is how systems of oppression propagate themselves.

Identity politics focuses on defining ourselves by the extent to which we are punished as individual groups, and under what criteria. It imagines a rational and restrained power matrix that metes out punishment according to the degree of difference and perceived threat. A methodical, conscientious, if misguided, gardener pruning a rose bush, rather than a brutal machinery that has invented arbitrary rationales to eat the human bodies it needs to sustain itself. Instead of building a coalition around the fact that we're all being hunted by the same beasts, idpol would rather build a hierarchy of prey animals according to the ways we will be skinned and cooked, stopping only short of putting us on a menu with accompanying prices.

This is the project of hyperindividualist neoliberalism, that is culturally entrenched in the West at every level. It's what drives the destructive identity discourses and leftist in-fighting that use trauma as currency. When you define yourself according to the appetite of the thing that wants to eat you, you end up weirdly attached to the romance of being eaten, and are loath to give it up.

#basically this is a lot of words to say that y'all all have Main Character Syndrome #and that all USAmericans are deeply conditioned into being egocentric and imperialist af #social justice #identity politics #western leftists #white queers #racism #anti-blackness #transphobia #queerphobia #homophobia #ableism #classism #class war #race politics #disability justice #neurodivergence #lgbtqia #queer discourse #antisemitism #knee of huss

[sassywelder9951]

Making white characters black isn't diversity

Literally the dumbest idea since chopping down the amazon rain forest.

First of all: corporations do not care about diversity or culture and depending on them for that is akin to trusting a politician.

Second: Simply color shifting a character who was originally white (little mermaid anyone?) is a slap in the face to people of color.

Why should we settle for a quick color change instead of getting new characters and unique stories centered around people of color?

Thirdly: if your argument for color washing white characters is to give children of color characters to cosplay as.... No.

Let your kids dress as whatever character they want! Let your white kids dress as Tiana, let your brown kids dress as Thor! Of course characters of color are going to be special to children, which is why we should be making new ones

Lastly: I am well fricking aware whitewashing has been a problem in media, but the solution to it is not payment in kind.

#Social justice #whitewashing #sjw #comics #movies #conservative #democrats #liberals #republicans #kids #race #race relations #race discrimination attorney austin #race swap #race change #race politics #politics #political #political correctness #PC

[theculturedmarxist]

In 2022 and early 2023, a highly publicized petition campaign sought to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. Louisiana law sets high hurdles for recall initiatives; in a jurisdiction the size of New Orleans, triggering the process requires valid signatures from twenty percent of registered voters on a petition requesting a recall election, and the effort ultimately failed. Nevertheless, the campaign is worth reflecting on for three reasons.

First, it at least bears a strong family resemblance to right-wing Republican attacks on Democrat-governed cities that recently have escalated from inflammatory rhetoric to concerted attempts to disempower, by extraordinary means, jurisdictions Democrats represent. To that extent, the Cantrell recall campaign is of a piece with the many Republican efforts at voter suppression around the country and the right’s broader and more openly authoritarian assault on democratic institutions at every level of government about which Thomas Byrne Edsall sounded the alarm in the New York Times.1 Second, the NOLATOYA campaign illustrates how race can function as a condensation symbol, a shorthand, diffuse, even tacit component of a discourse of political mobilization while not necessarily defining the mobilization’s policy objectives. Third, the character of the campaign, especially in light of the larger tendency of which it may be an instance, and the opposition’s responses also demonstrate the inadequacy of race-reductionist understandings even of the racialist element that helped drive it and the other reactionary initiatives, such as the Mississippi legislature’s move to undercut the authority of Jackson’s elected government.

The recall’s sponsors sought to stoke and take advantage of anxieties about street crime—most conspicuously the waves of porch piracy, carjackings, and homicides that spiked in New Orleans as in many cities during and after the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown—as well as the prodigiously bad, borderline dangerous condition of municipal roads and streets, a seemingly inexplicable and chronically unresolved breakdown of the city’s privatized sanitation pick-up operation, and the at best inconsistent quality of other public services.2 The campaign also played on hoary, racially inflected tropes such as generic allegations of incompetence and evocations of charges of immoral and “uppity” behavior, for example, in attacks on Cantrell for allegedly having an affair with a police officer on her detail, living at least part-time in a municipally owned luxury apartment on Jackson Square in the heart of the Vieux Carré, and flying first class at the city’s expense on international trade junkets.3 Recall supporters eventually leveled inflammatory allegations of incompetence, hostility to law enforcement, or corruption against the black, recently elected Orleans Parish District Attorney and unspecified judges and suggested that subsequent recall initiatives should target them as well.

The campaign’s titular co-chairs were black: one, Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, was a perennial candidate for electoral office who received five percent of the vote in the 2021 mayoral primary that Cantrell won with nearly sixty-five percent; the other, Eileen Carter, is a freelance “strategy consultant” who had been a first-term Cantrell administration appointee.4 Its sources of financial backing remained shadowy for months, but disclosures eventually confirmed that more than ninety percent of the campaign’s funding came from a single white developer and hospitality industry operative, Richard Farrell, who, in addition to having contributed to Cantrell in the past, had been one of Louisiana’s largest donors to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.5 Opponents of the recall argued that the fact that the initiative was funded almost entirely by a Trump mega-donor and its organizers’ attempt to purge the voter rolls in order to reduce the total number of signatures needed to force a new election6 indicated a more insidious objective, that the campaign was a ploy to advance the Republicans’ broader agenda of suppressing black voting and to discredit black officials.7

After much hype, the campaign failed abysmally. Certification of the petitions confirmed both that organizers had fallen far short of the minimum signature threshold required to spur a recall election and that support was sharply skewed racially. The latter was no surprise.8 The campaign originated in one of the wealthiest, whitest, and most Republican-leaning neighborhoods in the city. And, as I have indicated, proponents’ rhetoric—notwithstanding their insistence that the initiative had broad support across the city—traded in racialized imagery of feral criminality, and it too easily veered toward hyperbolic denunciation of the mayor’s purported moral degeneracy and an animus that seemed far out of proportion to her actual or alleged transgressions, which in any event hardly seemed to warrant the extraordinary effort of a recall, especially because Cantrell was term-limited and ineligible to pursue re-election in 2025. The extent to which recall advocates’ demonization of her drifted over into attacks on other black public officials also suggested a racial dimension to the campaign that no doubt made many black voters wary.

A racial explanation of the recall initiative offers benefits of familiarity. It fits into well-worn grooves of racial interest-group politics on both sides. It permits committed supporters of the recall to dismiss their effort’s failure as the result of blacks’ irresponsible racial-group defensiveness to the point of fraudulence and conspiracy, and it enables opponents to dismiss grievances against Cantrell’s mayoralty by attributing them to an effectively primordial white racism linked via historical allegory to the Jim Crow era.9 So, when journalists Jeff Adelson and Matt Sledge estimated that, although fifty-four percent of registered voters in Orleans Parish are black and thirty-six percent are white, seventy-six percent of the petition’s signers were white and just over fifteen percent were black, the finding was easily assimilable to a conventional “blacks say tomayto/whites say tomahto” racial narrative. The authors’ punchy inference that “White voters were more than seven times more likely to have signed the petition than a Black voter” reinforces that view.

By Adelson and Sledge’s calculation, more than 23,000 white voters signed the recall petition compared with roughly 7,000 blacks. At first blush, that stark difference seems to support a racial interpretation of the initiative. Yet that calculation also means that more than 57,000 white voters, for whatever reasons, did not sign it. That is, roughly two and a half times more white Orleans Parish voters did not sign the recall petition than did. One might wonder, therefore, why we should see support for the recall as the “white” position. Signers clustered disproportionately in the most affluent areas citywide, and those least likely to sign were concentrated in the city’s poorest areas. As Adelson and Sledge also note, there are many reasons one might not have signed the petition. Those could have ranged from explicit opposition to the initiative; skepticism about its motives, likelihood of success, or its impact if successful; absence of sufficient concern with the issue to seek to sign on; or other reasons entirely. That range would apply to the seventy percent of white voters who did not sign as well as the nearly ninety-five percent of black voters who did not. From that perspective, “race” is in this instance less an explanation than an alternative to one.

Organizers and supporters of the recall no doubt also had various motives and objectives, and those may have evolved with the campaign itself. Batiste and Carter are political opportunists and, as a badly defeated opponent and a former staffer, may harbor idiosyncratic personal grievances against Cantrell; they also cannot be reduced merely to race traitors or dupes not least because roughly 7,000 more black voters signed onto the recall petition. Farrell and the handful of other Republican large donors who sustained the initiative likely had varying long- and short-game objectives, from weakening Cantrell’s mayoralty to payback for the city’s aggressive pandemic response, which met with disgruntlement and opposition from hospitality industry operators, to fomenting demoralization and antagonism toward municipal government or government in general, to enhancing individual and organizational leverage in mundane partisan politics, including simply reinforcing the knee-jerk partisan divide. And, even if not in the minds of initiators all along, voter suppression in Orleans Parish may have become an unanticipated benefit along the way.

Other enthusiasts no doubt acted from a mélange of motives. Demands for “accountability” and “transparency,” neoliberal shibboleths that only seem to convey specific meanings, stood in for causal arguments tying conditions in the city that have generated frustration, anxiety, or fear to claims about Cantrell’s character. Those Orwellian catchwords of a larger program of de-democratization10 overlap the often allusively racialized discourse in which Cantrell, black officialdom, unresponsive, purportedly inept and corrupt government, uncontrolled criminality, and intensifying insecurity and social breakdown all signify one another as a singular, though amorphous, target of resentment. The recall campaign condensed frustrations and anxieties into a politics of scapegoating that fixates all those vague or inchoate concerns onto a malevolent, alien entity that exists to thwart or destroy an equally vague and fluid “us.” And that entity is partly racialized because race is a discourse of scapegoating.

But race is not the only basis for scapegoating. As I indicate elsewhere, “the MAGA fantasy of ‘the pedophile Democratic elite’ today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the ‘Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker’ and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.”11 The scapegoat is an evanescent presence, created through moral panic and just-so stories and projected onto targeted individuals or populations posited as the embodied cause of the conditions generating fear and anxiety. As an instrument of political action, scapegoating’s objective is to fashion a large popular constituency defined by perceived threat from and opposition to a demonized other, a constituency that then can be mobilized against policies and political agendas activists identify with the evil other and its nefarious designs—without having to address those policies and agendas on their merits.

A Facebook post a colleague shared from a relative long since lost to the QAnon/MAGA world exemplifies the chain of associations undergirding that strain of conspiratorial thinking and its scapegoating politics: “It’s time for Americans to stop hiding behind the democracy dupe that has been used as an opiate to extort American wages to wage war against any country that said no to Rothschild’s money changing loanshark wannabe satan’s cult.” My colleague underscored that the antisemitism apparent in that post was a late-life graft onto the relative’s political views; neither Jews nor Jewishness had any presence in the circumstances of their upbringing, neither within their family nor the broader demographic environment. Antisemitism, that is, can function, at least for a time, as an item on a checklist that signals belonging in the elect of combatants against the malevolent grand conspiracy as much as or more than it expresses a committed bigotry against Jews or Judaism.

It is understandable that the partly racialized recall campaign would provoke a least-common-denominator objection that it was a ploy to attack black, or black female, political leadership. It no doubt was, at least as an easy first pass at low-hanging fruit in mobilizing support. However, complaint that the recall effort was racially motivated missed the point—or took the bait. Scapegoating is fundamentally about misdirection, like a pickpocket’s dodge. A politics based on scapegoating is especially attractive to proponents of anti-popular, inegalitarian agendas who might otherwise be unable to elicit broad support for programs and initiatives that are anti-democratic or facilitate regressive redistribution.12 And the forces driving the Cantrell recall campaign fit that profile.

That it was backed by significant right-wing donors yet failed so badly raises a possibility that the recall campaign may never have been serious as an attempt to remove Cantrell from office.13 If their prattle about accountability, transparency, and responsibility to taxpayers were genuine, organizers should have admitted the failure and not bothered to submit their petitions and thereby avoided the administrative burdens of the certification process—unless forcing that extraordinary undertaking were part of a Potemkin effort to simulate a serious recall campaign. Instead, well after it should have recognized and acknowledged failure, the campaign organization attempted to keep recall chatter in the news cycle by means of coyness and dissimulation regarding the status of their effort and continued to manufacture supposed Cantrell outrages, no matter how dubious or picayune, to feed the fires of salacious exposé of the “you won’t believe what she’s doing now!” variety. When authorities confirmed the magnitude of the failure, including evidence of thousands of obviously bogus signatures nonetheless submitted, organizers fell back on the standard MAGA-era canard in the face of defeat—challenging the credibility of the officials designated by law to determine the signatures’ validity. Notwithstanding the complex motives and expectations of individual supporters, all this further suggests that the recall initiative at one level was suspiciously consistent with the multifarious assaults on democratic government that right-wing militants have been pursuing concertedly around the country since at least 2020.

That larger, more insidious effort and its objectives—which boil down to elimination of avenues for expression of popular democratic oversight in service to consolidation of unmediated capitalist class power14—constitute the gravest danger that confronts us. And centering on the racial dimension of stratagems like the Cantrell recall plays into the hands of the architects of that agenda and the scapegoating politics on which they depend by focusing exclusively on an aspect of the tactic and not the goal. From the perspective of that greater danger, whether the recall effort was motivated by racism is quite beside the point. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. With or without conscious intent, and no matter what shockingly ugly and frightening expressions it may take rhetorically, the racial dimension of the right wing’s not-so-stealth offensive is a smokescreen. The pedophile cannibals, predatory transgender subversives, and proponents of abortion on demand up to birth join familiar significations attached to blacks and a generically threatening nonwhite other in melding a singular, interchangeable, even contradictory—the Jew as banker and Bolshevik—phantasmagorical enemy.

An important takeaway from the nature of this threat is that a race-first politics is not capable of responding effectively to it. Race reductionism fails intellectually and is counterproductive politically because its assumption that race/racism is transhistorical and its corresponding demand that we understand the connection between race and politics in contemporary life through analogy with the segregation era or slavery do not equip us to grasp the specificities of the current moment, including the historically specific dangers that face us. This is not a new limitation. That anachronistic orientation underwrote badly inaccurate prognostications about the likely political impact of changing racial demography in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and was totally ineffective for mounting challenges to charterization of the Orleans Parish school system and the destruction of public housing in the midst of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing.15 Race-reductionist interpretation could specify neither the mechanisms nor the concatenation of political forces that impelled either of those regressive programs. Race reductionists seemed to assume that defining those interventions, as well as the regressive real estate practices commonly known as gentrification and the problems of hyper-policing, as racist would call forth some sort of remedial response.16 It did not.

Similarly, just as assertion that mass incarceration is the “New Jim Crow” does not help us understand or respond to the complex political-economic or ideological forces that have produced mass incarceration,17 criticism of contemporary voter suppression efforts by tying them to those at the end of the nineteenth century does not help us specify the nature of the threat, the objectives to which it is linked, or approaches to countering it. Regarding voter suppression and disfranchisement, even in the late nineteenth century, while a) its point was openly and explicitly to disfranchise blacks and b) there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the commitments to white supremacy expressed by disfranchisement’s architects, disfranchising blacks for the sake of doing so was not the point either; neither was imposing codified racial subordination an end in itself.

The racial dimension of the reactionary campaign then was also a smokescreen that helped to facilitate assertion of ruling class power after the defeat of the Populist insurgency by attacking blacks as a scapegoat, a misdirection from the Democrat planter-merchant-capitalist elites’ sharply class-skewed agenda, including codified racial segregation, which they could not fully impose until the electorate had been “purified.” From the architects’ perspective, the problem with blacks’ voting was ultimately that they did not reliably vote Democrat. If black voters could have been counted on to vote for the Democrat agenda, committed white supremacy likely would have found expression in areas other than suffrage. Indeed, one facet of Bookerite accommodationist politics at the time—articulated by, among others, novelist Sutton Griggs—was that black Americans’ reflexive support of Republicans had forced Democrats to resort to disfranchisement and that, if principled Democrats felt they could count on black votes, they wouldn’t need to pursue such measures.18 Among advocates of voter suppression today, black voting is in part a metonym for a composite scapegoat that includes Democratic or “liberal” or “woke” voters, all of whom, like the liberal pedophile cannibals, are characterizable as not “real Americans” and whose voting is therefore fraudulent by definition. And propagandists meld the images together in service of deflecting attention from the right’s regressive policy agenda.19

It is instructive that at the same time contemporary rightists commonly tout evidence of support from blacks and Hispanics. Of course, that move is largely a cynical ploy—the lie, straight from the fascist agitator’s handbook, accompanied by a knowing wink to the faithful—to deflect criticism of their obvious racial scapegoating. However, knee-jerk dismissals of that reaction as disingenuous or of black and Hispanic supporters as inauthentic, dupes, or sellouts are problematic. There is certainly no shortage of malicious racism within the right wing, but black and Latino supporters of right-wing politics cannot all be dismissed as the equivalent of cash-and-carry minstrel hustlers like Diamond & Silk or cash-and-carry lunatics like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas, just as the 7,000 blacks who signed the Cantrell recall petition cannot be dismissed as dupes of the NOLATOYA campaigners. While the percentages remained relatively small, increases in black and Hispanic votes for Trump between 2016 and 2020 indicate that those voters see more in the faux populist appeal than racism or white supremacy.20

What is true of those black and brown voters who are unlikely to see themselves as racists21 is no doubt also true for some percentage of whites who gravitate toward the reactionary right’s siren song.22 I do not mean to suggest that we should pander to the reactionary expressions around which the right has sought to mobilize those people. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that what makes many of them susceptible to that ugly politics is a reasonable sense that Democratic liberalism has offered them little for a half century. Obama promised transcendence and deliverance, based on evanescent imagery deriving largely from his race. His failure to live up to the “hope” he promoted set the stage for an equal and opposite reaction.

Most of all, race-reductionist explanations and simplistic historical analogies are counterproductive as a politics because they fail to provide a basis for challenging the looming authoritarian threat. I have asked supporters of reparations politics for more than twenty years how they imagine forming a political coalition broad enough to prevail on that objective in a majoritarian democracy.23 To date, the question has never received a response other than some version of the non sequitur “don’t you agree that black people deserve compensation?” or sophistries like the flippant assertion that abolition and the civil rights movement did not have a chance to win until they did.24 Recently, a questioner from the audience, someone with whom I have had a running exchange over many years regarding racism’s primacy as a political force, catechized me at a panel at Columbia University [beginning at 1:01:48] for my views on the Mississippi legislature’s attacks on the city of Jackson. There was no specific question; the intervention was a prompt for me to acknowledge that the Jackson case is evidence of racism’s independent power. That interaction captures a crucial problem with race reductionism as a politics. It centers on exposé and moralistic accusation.

But what would happen if we were to accept as common sense the conviction of advocates of race-reductionist politics that “racism” is the source of the various inequalities and injustices that affect us—including the anti-democratic travesties being perpetrated on Jackson’s residents and elected officials? What policy interventions would follow? And how would they be realized? Those questions do not arise because the point of this politics is not to transform social relations but to secure the social position of those who purport to speak on behalf of an undifferentiated black population. Insofar as it is a politics at all, it is an interest-group arrangement in which Racial Spokespersons propound as “racial” perspectives points of view that harmonize with Democratic neoliberalism. For the umpteenth time,25 a politics focused on identifying group-level disparities within the current regime of capitalist inequality is predicated logically, but most of all materially, on not challenging that regime but equalizing “group” differences within it. That anti-disparitarian politics hews to neoliberalism’s egalitarian ideal of equal access to competition for a steadily shrinking pool of opportunities for a secure life.26 And, as has been explicit since at least 2015, when the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed a more social-democratic approach toward the center stage of American political debate, anti-disparitarian “leftism” is a militant ideological force defending neoliberalism’s logic against downwardly redistributive threats, to the extent of denouncing calls for expanding the sphere of universal public goods as irresponsible and castigating appeals to working-class interests as racist.

Decades of race reductionist assertion and resort to history as allegory in lieu of empirical argument and clear political strategy27 have propagated another discourse of misdirection. Insistence that any inequality or injustice affecting black people must be understood as resultant from a generic and transhistorical racism, for instance, shifts attention away from the current sources of inequality in capitalist political economy for reductionist antiracists just as culture war rhetoric does for the right. As the genesis of the “racial wealth gap” has shown, the premise that slavery and Jim Crow continue to shape all black people’s lives and forge a fundamentally common condition of suffering and common destiny has underwritten a racial trickledown policy response that is a class politics dressed up as a racial-group politics.28 The sleight-of-hand that makes capitalist class dynamics disappear into a narrative of unremitting, demonic White Supremacy does the work for Democratic neoliberals, of whatever color or gender, that the pedophile cannibal bugbear does for the reactionary right. Thus race reductionism can present making rich black people richer and narrowing the “wealth gap” between them and their white counterparts as a strategy for pursuit of justice for all black people or attack social-democratic policy proposals as somehow not relevant to blacks and indeed abetting white racists, or attempt to whistle past the fact that the Racial Reckoning produced by the Summer of George Floyd culminated most conspicuously in a $100 million gift from Jeff Bezos to Van Jones and a flood of nearly $2 billion of corporate money into various racial justice advocacy organizations.

The rise of the authoritarian threat should raise the stakes of the moment to a point at which we recognize that this antiracist politics has no agenda for winning significant reforms, much less a strategy for social transformation, that it is not only incapable of anchoring a challenge to the peril that faces us but is fundamentally not interested in doing so. There seems to be a startling myopia underlying this politics and the strata whose interests it articulates—unless, of course, its only point is to secure what Kenneth Warren characterizes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem,”29 no matter what regime is in power. In that case, the Judenrat is in effect its model, and therefore all bets are off.

#race politics #racism #race reductionism #adolph reed #new orleans #republicans #democrats #antiracism

[shoujoboy-restart]

But are PragerU are right though? It seems most people came to the conclusion that what they are saying is extremely questionable to the point that it's sounds like they are saying slavery wasn't bad it was black people or something that just downplay what black people went through.

Like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BfE-GRNJqA

Again, they can be right about statements questioning the institution, organization and corporation labelling themselves BLM.

But the goal of Prager U isn't to discredit BLM the org but conflate both to discredit the saying and the movement, and we can see it by them.

And yeah, sorry I'm gonna have to hand wave that video you linked. Is the most unserious ass shit I have seen in my life. It doesn't provide proof of quote or beliefs head by Frederick Douglass to prove he would even agree with Prager U and what them stand for, highly doubt that man would associate himself with a organization funded by oil and fracking to control public opinion to control legislation.

And once again, I do trust Prager U to provide accurate information in race discussions, because they sellouts like Candace saying shit like "your ancestors were the ones who sold and enslaved you" because she's using hypermodern popular beliefs that all black and white are the same, it would make zero fucking sense to say "Irish were sold and enslaved by their ancestors" because they were colonized and enslaved by the British.

( Link to the video's creator, highly recommend watching him for really.gopd debunking and information on racial conflict and debunk shit from the like of Prager U )

Genuine tip, don't use Prager U and Daily Wire as sources or foundation to find anything except claims to investigate and debunk, they are constantly found to lie, stretch the truth and straight up fabricate information, they employeed wife beater Steven Crowder with a 50 million contract to sell you morals, if that should tell you something.

#discourse #politics #race #race politics #sources #information #prager u

[nerdqueenmari]

am I allowed to be bothered by recasting a bunch of Hamilton actors with white actors? or is that inappropriate? 

#race politics #please don't flagellate me #i'm honestly asking #because the predominantly non-white cast was a big part of the original cast

[ideasmithy]

REVIEW:<i>Honour</i>- Elif Shafak: Trauma Love Of Brown Women

'Honour' by Elif Shafak examines Turkish patriarchy mingling with Western traditions & values. It addresses gendered violence, racism & economic exploitation.

HONOUR replaces The Bastard of Istanbul as my favourite book by Elif Shafak. Once again, this story is about Turkish women navigating the changing faces of patriarchy between Western notions and their traditional values. But this time, we also see the journeys of the men through these same paths. The Turkish characters originate from poor remote villages rather than the bustling city of…

View On WordPress

#Brown culture #Feminism #Gender #Honour killing #Islamophobia #Race politics #Religion #Turkey

[scavengedluxury]

When politicians say they want to take Britain back the 1950s and they actually deliver.

#oxbridge boat race #uk politics #water pollution #can some future Ministers fall in pls

[typhlonectes]

#eric foner #history #u.s. history #race #politics #USA

[animentality]

#twitter #race history #us politics #us history

[destielmemenews]

"In a stunning and unprecedented decision, the Colorado Supreme Court removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot, ruling that he isn’t an eligible presidential candidate because of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”"

source 1

source 2

source 3

#destiel meme news #destiel meme #news #united states #us news #us politics #donald trump #fuck trump #2024 elections #biden harris 2024 #elections #2024 presidential race #OF FUCK YEAH #YEAAAAAAAH #BIG WIN BIG WIN FOR DEMOCRACY #colorado #thank you Colorado

[thatdiva]

#slavery #ron desantis #jason aldean #education #politics #florida #racism deniers #whitewashing history #crt #critical race theory #dei

[mysharona1987]

Literally the dude is pulling a Bond villain and explaining the evil plan beforehand.

And the press will still fall for it.

#Palestine #blm #israel #poc #woc #critical race theory #politics #journalism #democrats #dsa #Colonization #hamas #middle east #gop

[fremedon]

For U.S. folks, a guide to state supreme court races in your state this year: https://boltsmag.org/your-state-by-state-guide-to-the-2024-supreme-court-elections/

These downballot races can have a huge impact on life in your state. If you have judges on the ballot this year, please read up on the race!

#us politics #downballot races #state supreme courts

[the-last-hipopotamovolador]

Okey a lot of fucking disgusting stuff are happening all around the world. The genocide of palestinians, the new anti queer law in russia, the congo situation and god knows how many other fucking disgusting inhumane shit is happening in so many places right now.

LISTEN i know that even for people like me who arent victims of any of these situations everything can be so overwhelming right now, and that we may feel hopless and we just dont wanna do anything anymore because everything seems pointless.

BUT FOR THE LOVE OF WHATEVER YOU BELIVE DO NOT BACK THE FUCK DOWN!

Like me, so many other people of the world (even if we belong to a "minority" and for that suffer daily discrimination) we are lucky enought to be ALLOWED to exist because for fucking coincidence we live in places where our goverments or/and the international powers allow us to just fucking be alive.

But there are so many people who the only thing tthey did was being born and for that the goverments decide that they should not exist.

If you were born in palestina to Israel and most of the world you arent fucking allowed to be alive.

If you are queer and were born in russia your fucking goverment says that you are not allowed to be alive.

If you are black in congo you are not allowed to be alive.

If you are native, for most of the goverments in the america continent you are not allowed to be alive.

And if you are a person with vulva/ you are a woman you are not allowed to be alive in most of the fucking world.

And so, so, so many more examples could be add because in this fucking sick world just being ALLOWED to be alive is a privilege.

So PLEASE I BEG YOU, IF YOU ARE IN A POSITION WERE YOUR MERE EXISTENCE IS ALLOWED (even for the dislike of some people) PLEASE, EVEN IF IT HURTS JUST RAGE, SPEAK THE FUCK UP! DONT BE QUIET!

If there are ambassadors of Israel in your country or/and from any other country that prohibits the existence of people, go and RAGE! GO AND DEMAND A CHANGE!.

If YOUR COUNTRY is in ANY way supporting the fact that some groups have the power to decide whether or not some people should be allowed to exist GO AND SCREAM AND SHOUT AND FUKING RAGE.

We have the previlege of being allowed to exist, is our human obligation to speak and shout for those who doesnt have that privilege and arent heared.

#mio #russia #rusian #lgbtq+ #queer rights #race #racisim #israel #palestine #free palestine #free gaza #human rights #women rights #trans rights #free congo #congo #activism #politics #black lives matter #black power #genocide #black women #africa #middle east #all the power to the people #sick world #sick sad world #rage #arabic #social justice

[odinsblog]

This is recent history. Ruby Bridges is 68yrs old and she is still alive.

Emily Conklin is thee definition of a racist Karen, and she is trying to whitewash the history white children learn by erasing a rated PG Disney movie that has already been shown for years in Pinellas County schools, usually as a part of Black History Month.

Two immediate thoughts that come to mind are:

“The people who threw rocks at Ruby Bridges for trying to go to school in 1960 now are upset their grandchildren might learn about them throwing rocks at Ruby Bridges for trying to go to school.”

and

“IF BLACK CHILDREN ARE OLD ENOUGH TO EXPERIENCE RACISM, WHITE CHILDREN ARE OLD ENOUGH TO LEARN ABOUT IT”

Look, Ruby Bridges was six years old when racist white parents (men and women) threw rocks and hissy fits because she was trying to get an education. A full year younger than most of the white children who are now being “protected” from learning the truth about what their grandparents did.

I guess these delicate snowflakes are so triggered by the racism of their elders that they need to get the Republican governor to whitewash away the truth.

I’m almost 40yrs old and I used to wonder how it was that in college, white kids my age genuinely believed that Martin Luther King, Jr. died of old age. But somehow, every single Black person my age knew the truth. How does that happen?? This is how it happens. This is a prime example of precisely how that happened and still happens—because to “protect” them from the truth, white kids weren’t taught that he was assassinated. It’s literally no different than raising generations of white kids to believe that 2+2=5. There’s going to be serious problems when they hit the real world. But what can I say? Conservatives like ‘em dumb and ignorant.

Anyway, this is how you get generations of fully grown white adults who truly honestly believe foolishness like “racism is over,” or “Martin Luther King basically ended racism,” or, “we don’t need affirmative action because there is no more racism; if anything it’s white people who are more discriminated against now.” (The majority of white people polled said the same thing in the 1960s too, btw).

Keeping as many white people as possible ignorant of the truth does not happen by accident. It’s very intentional. And that’s not to say that ALL white people are ignorant of the truth. Some of them, like Emily Conklin, know the truth, but just do not care.

And make no mistake: The same white people who want to keep their white children “pure” and “innocent” have ZERO problems criminalizing and sending young Black children directly to jail for even the slightest misbehavior in a classroom.

Evil, racist cowards (redundant, I know).

#politics #emily conklin #republicans #ruby bridges #whitewashing history #erasure #north shore elementary school #black history #crt #critical race theory #book banning #florida #floriduh #ron desantis

[tomorrowusa]

Don't risk a rerun of the 2000 election.

In the first presidential election of the 21st century many deluded progressives voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

Their foolishness gave us eight years of George W. Bush who plagued the country with two recessions (including the Great Recession) and two wars (one totally unnecessary and one which could have been avoided if he heeded an intelligence brief 5 weeks before 9/11).

Oh yeah, Dubya also appointed one conservative and one batshit crazy reactionary to the US Supreme Court. Roberts and Alito are still there.

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post offers some thoughts.

Why leftists should work their hearts out for Biden in 2024

Ask a Democrat with a long memory what the numbers 97,488 and 537 represent, and their face will twist into a grimace. The first is the number of votes Ralph Nader received in Florida in 2000 as the nominee of the Green Party; the second is the margin by which George W. Bush was eventually certified the winner of the state, handing him the White House. Now, with President Biden gearing up for reelection, talk of a spoiler candidate from the left is again in the air. That’s unfortunate, because here’s the truth: The past 2½ years under Biden have been a triumph for progressivism, even if it’s not in most people’s interest to admit it. This was not what most people expected from Biden, who ran as a relative moderate in the 2020 Democratic primary. His nomination was a victory for pragmatism with its eyes directed toward the center. But today, no one can honestly deny that Biden is the most progressive president since at least Lyndon B. Johnson. His judicial appointments are more diverse than those of any of his predecessors. He has directed more resources to combating climate change than any other president. Notwithstanding the opposition from the Supreme Court, his administration has moved aggressively to forgive and restructure student loans.

Three years ago the economy was in horrible shape because of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic. Now unemployment is steadily below 4%, job creation continues to exceed expectations, and wages are rising as unions gain strength. The post-pandemic, post-Afghan War inflation rate has receded to near normal levels; people in the 1970s would have sold their souls for a 3.2% (and dropping) inflation rate. And many of the effects of "Bidenomics" have yet to kick in.

And in a story that is criminally underappreciated, his administration’s policy reaction to the covid-induced recession of 2020 was revolutionary in precisely the ways any good leftist should favor. It embraced massive government intervention to stave off the worst economic impacts, including handing millions of families monthly checks (by expanding the child tax credit), giving all kids in public schools free meals, boosting unemployment insurance and extending health coverage to millions.

It worked. While inflation rose (as it did worldwide), the economy’s recovery has been blisteringly fast. It took more than six years for employment rates to return to what they were before the Great Recession hit in 2008, but we surpassed January 2020 jobs levels by the spring of 2022 — and have kept adding jobs ever since. To the idealistic leftist, that might feel like both old news and a partial victory at best. What about everything supporters of Bernie Sanders have found so thrilling about the Vermont senator’s vision of the future, from universal health care to free college? It’s true Biden was never going to deliver that, but to be honest, neither would Sanders had he been elected president. And that brings me to the heart of how people on the left ought to think about Biden and his reelection.

Biden has gotten things done. The US economy is doing better than those of almost every other advanced industrialized country.

Our rivals China and Russia are both worse off than they were three years ago. And NATO is not just united, it's growing.

Sadly, we still need to deal with a far right MAGA cult at home who would wreck the country just to get its own way.

Biden may be elderly and unexciting, but that is one of the reasons he won in 2020. Many people just wanted an end to the daily drama of Trump's capricious and incompetent rule by tweet. And a good portion of those people live in places that count greatly in elections – suburbs and exurbs.

Superhero films seem to be slipping in popularity. Hopefully that's a sign that voters are less likely to embrace self-appointed political messiahs to save them from themselves.

Good governance is a steady process – not a collection of magic tricks. Experienced and competent individuals who are not too far removed from the lives of the people they represent are the best people to have in government.

Paul Waldman concludes his column speaking from the heart as a liberal...

I’ve been in and around politics for many years, and even among liberals, I’ve almost always been one of the most liberal people in the room. Yet only since Biden’s election have I realized that I will probably never see a president as liberal as I’d like. It’s not an easy idea to make peace with. But it suggests a different way of thinking about elections — as one necessary step in a long, difficult process. The further you are to the left, the more important Biden’s reelection ought to be to you. It might require emotional (and policy) compromise, but for now, it’s also the most important tool you have to achieve progressive ends.

Exactly. Rightwingers take the long view. It took them 49 years but they eventually got Roe v. Wade overturned. To succeed, we need to look upon politics as an extended marathon rather as one short sprint.

Republicans may currently be bickering, but they will most likely unite behind whichever anti-abortion extremist they nominate.

It's necessary to get the word out now that the only way to defeat climate-denying, abortion-restricting, assault weapon-loving, race-baiting, homophobic Republicans is to vote Democratic.

#paul waldman #liberalism #election 2000 #election 2024 #joe biden #third parties #vote blue no matter who #donald trump #dumpster fire #trumpster fire #fascism vs. democracy #nra republicans #abortion #climate change #lgbtq+ rights #race-baiting #take the political long view #phil hands